When Lenny Henry made his professional stage debut as Othello in 2009, plenty of people expected him to flounder. Yet he rose to the challenge, and since then his theatre career has unfolded interestingly. Here he’s the star in a revival of August Wilson’s family drama, written in the Eighties but set in the Fifties. And he’s on superb form in a part that has previously been filled by James Earl Jones and Denzel Washington.

He plays Troy Maxson, perhaps the most towering of all Wilson’s creations. Troy was once a promising baseball player whose prospects were hampered by his colour. Now he is a garbage collector, apparently anchored by bullish pride and his marriage to the gracious and sometimes fierce Rose (Tanya Moodie, excellent).

Henry finds richness and depth in the role: at first Troy looks like a jovial boozehound, but we gradually see his complexity. He is a flawed and wounded character, capable of plundering his brother’s post-war disability allowance. Even his efforts to construct a fence around his Pittsburgh home are double-edged: he wants to confine his family and also keep the rest of the world at bay.

Troy is prone to conflict, above all with his sons. Cory (Ashley Zhangazha) has a talent for American football, which may hold the key to his getting a better education than Troy ever had. Lyons (Peter Bankolé) is a gifted musician. Troy takes no interest in Lyons’s music and dismisses him as a scrounger, but reserves truly humiliating treatment for the younger and more vulnerable Cory.

Director Paulette Randall locates the play’s emotional core. The relationships are all convincingly presented, and there’s exuberant work from Colin McFarlane as Troy’s drinking buddy Jim Bono and Ako Mitchell as his mentally disturbed brother, Gabriel. Crucially, too, the restrictions of Troy’s world are well defined. Yet Wilson’s writing is verbose, laden with a symbolism that is rather too obvious. His epic ambition and the universality of his themes don’t quite make up for the clunky exposition and overstretched metaphors – especially about baseball.

Running two and three-quarter hours, Fences is dense and unsettling. It’s brave to programme such a meaty, daunting piece during the summer months. But it is worth seeing for Henry’s immense performance, which switches compellingly from humour to fury and from hopefulness to piercing disillusionment.